Book Recommendation: All Quiet on the Western Front

It seems to have become the custom for me to guiltily apply time to this, customarily beginning with an apology to my admittedly singular audience(sup Dan), and add a list of things which prevented any sort of writing. Though it seems all those who are not committed to blogging follow this selfsame pattern, and who am I to buck a trend.

Going to do something I had not considered doing before, and that is, as the title suggestively pre-empts, recommend a book. The book is called All Quiet on the Western Front by a German man named Erich Maria Remarque. It is a novel of sorts, I do not think justice is done by calling it so, as it is a type of loose, real-life chronicling of the then 19 year old author during his experiences during the Great War of the early 20th Century. Him and a group of schoolmates have been convinced of the virtuousness of the war and signed up before conscription was enforced by their teacher(Kantorek is the teacher who convinced them, conscription was not enforced by their teacher..) - he convinced them with tales of the glory of war, the majesty in defending one's country and Kaiser, and so on. Of course, in a state of warfare, these are not the emotions that any thinking person can honestly maintain, neither subjectively nor objectively. It seems that in trench warfare, adolescent arbitrary patriotism and political idealism may initially convince, but should that same person take a step back, the reality hits hard - as is clear at certain points when the German soldiers give thoughts to their fellow teen French and Russian enemies, and how wars are fought in agreements(or rather, disagreements) by men so far detached from them that the ones to whom they are pointing their guns, and vice versa, are only so by virtue of this same type of pressure to love one's country and be prepared to die for grass and a particular arrangement of colours on a flag. "For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity . . . to the future . . . in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. . . . The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces." It is a beautifully written book, indeed Remarque was a sort of amateur poet and playwright in his teenage years pre-WW1, and his references to classical literature and philosophy at various points are a touching way in which this adolescent mindset of reading everything he could get his hands on has had a severe impact on both his outlook and the way he develops language.

Gorish images are not simply alluded to in passing amidst a sea of dialogue and exploration of war or trench conditions, they make some of the most exciting and horrifying sequences in the book. "Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?" - Sequences such as this may seem cliché when I cherry-pick-quote them, but for two reasons they are not. The first being Remarque's fine ability to harness his language in an alluring and seductive manner, and the second being that Remarque was one of the first people who wrote a novel concerning global conflict, he in fact is one of the founders of such language. The title is a much-referenced phrase in contemporary society, but is so because of this book.

To go slightly beyond the literal events of the book, it is also a book of mental struggle. When Remarque writes, "We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? That is long ago. We are old folk." He may seem naive, but that is one thing which he is certainly not. Paul Bäumer(what Remarque named the protagonist) goes through a sequence of events which I can only say make you fear for his life despite the fact that you're only on page 40 and know you have well over half of the book to go. Such are his lucid and compelling descriptions of the situations, somehow making you ambivalently want him to engage in more combat so as to read his depictions of them, but simultaneously wanting him to escape from the hellish reality. He surmises that whether he makes it out of the war does not really matter, the older soldiers have a lives to return to, and the younger children at home know nothing of it, his generation are caught in a flux, an abyss, that will consume them either during the war, or for the rest of their lives after it. It is a heartfelt and honest conclusion made in a book of which I have still given away nothing of its plot nor its events. "Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me."

I find it impossible to rate a book in the same way you can an album, but I implore you(sup Dan) to seek and find this book if you have not already enjoyed it. A compelling and essential read, if I can be terse enough to assume the authority to say such a thing.